What is One Bag, One Year, One Student?
It’s a simple concept with deeply impactful results. For every purchase of a bag from the Bogolanfini collection, we will give a student in Mali Africa all of the school supplies they need to ensure that they can stay in school and don’t have to drop out.
Why Mali? Why School Supplies? Why bags?
Learn more about our entire project by reading a message from our Founder Tiemoko below.
What is One Bag, One Year, One Student?
It’s a simple concept with deeply impactful results. For every purchase of a bag from the Bogolanfini collection, we will give a student in Mali Africa all of the school supplies they need to ensure that they can stay in school and don’t have to drop out.
Why Mali? Why School Supplies? Why bags?
Learn more about our entire project by reading a message from our Founder Tiemoko below.
Mali Needs Their Kids To Succeed
Why are we called Tendance?
The meaning of the word Tendance is “watchful care”. Our founder Tiemoko was surprised when he found out that the care his people needed was something as simple as school supplies.
For Tendance as a brand, it means that we are taking care of our future generations through the purchase of culturally significant pieces that we use every day.
For the people of Mali, that means One Bag, One Year, One Student!
Why are we called Tendance?
The meaning of the word Tendance is “watchful care”. Our founder Tiemoko was surprised when he found out that the care his people needed was something as simple as school supplies.
For Tendance as a brand, it means that we are taking care of our future generations through the purchase of culturally significant pieces that we use every day.
For the people of Mali, that means One Bag, One Year, One Student!
A Message From Our Founder:
My name is Tiemoko, and I am proud to be from the stunning country of Mali, in North Western Africa.
While I am proud of my heritage, Mali is not without problems. It is ranked as the second poorest country in the world, with literacy standing at a mere 31%.
While I was among those fortunate enough to start my education in Mali, I was beyond fortunate that my father had a job that brought around the world to be educated in many of the finest systems in existence.
Ultimately, I was lucky enough to move almost 7000 miles away to California, so I could pursue higher education and get an amazing job that most from my motherland couldn’t even dream of. Still their struggle has stayed in my mind through all of the benefits I have received and all of the privileges I am surrounded with.
I needed to find a way to make a difference for the future generations of the people of Mali, so I started to study the source of the problem, and the findings shocked me.
A lack of opportunity breeds poverty. That’s not a shock, but being unemployable breeds breeds that lack of opportunity.
And not being able to read is one of the major factors that leads to people being unemployable.
Here’s the shocking part though:
The extremely low literacy rate in Mali is NOT due to the lack of willingness to attend school, and in urban areas, it's not even a lack of schools!
What IS lacking is the financial freedom to obtain basic school supplies.
You see most students end up dropping because they simply don’t have the supplies they need to keep studying. There are classrooms with extra space and there are children who can’t attend, all because they don’t have the books, the pencils, the basics they need to get the education that can end their cycle of extreme poverty.
That’s why I started Tendance.That’s why I started the One Bag, One Year, One Student movement.
For each bag we sell, we ensure that a child in Mali will have all of the school supplies they need to keep studying, to keep learning, to keep improving themselves so they can improve their family’s wellbeing, their country’s well-being and the wellbeing of the world as a whole.
A Message From Our Founder:
My name is Tiemoko, and I am proud to be from the stunning country of Mali, in North Western Africa.
While I am proud of my heritage, Mali is not without problems. It is ranked as the second poorest country in the world, with literacy standing at a mere 31%.
While I was among those fortunate enough to start my education in Mali, I was beyond fortunate that my father had a job that brought around the world to be educated in many of the finest systems in existence.
Ultimately, I was lucky enough to move almost 7000 miles away to California, so I could pursue higher education and get an amazing job that most from my motherland couldn’t even dream of. Still their struggle has stayed in my mind through all of the benefits I have received and all of the privileges I am surrounded with.
I needed to find a way to make a difference for the future generations of the people of Mali, so I started to study the source of the problem, and the findings shocked me.
A lack of opportunity breeds poverty. That’s not a shock, but being unemployable breeds breeds that lack of opportunity.
And not being able to read is one of the major factors that leads to people being unemployable.
Here’s the shocking part though:
The extremely low literacy rate in Mali is NOT due to the lack of willingness to attend school, and in urban areas, it's not even a lack of schools!
What IS lacking is the financial freedom to obtain basic school supplies.
You see most students end up dropping because they simply don’t have the supplies they need to keep studying. There are classrooms with extra space and there are children who can’t attend, all because they don’t have the books, the pencils, the basics they need to get the education that can end their cycle of extreme poverty.
That’s why I started Tendance. That’s why I started the One Bag, One Year, One Student movement.
For each bag we sell, we ensure that a child in Mali will have all of the school supplies they need to keep studying, to keep learning, to keep improving themselves so they can improve their family’s well-being, their country’s well-being and the well-being of the world as a whole.
